Archive for August, 2004

Atari 7800 20th Anniversary Reunion

Atari Historian and hero of the people Curt Vendel, curator of The Atari History Museum, arranged and presented the Atari 7800 20th Anniversary Reunion at Vintage Computer Festival 2.0 on July 16, 2004. Vendel, along with eleven or so original Atari 7800 developers, presented all sorts of crazy crap at the featured Atari Museum display. Among these items were original schematics, prototype hardware, and, yes, unreleased prototype software for the Atari 7800.

Knowing Vendel, ROM dumps are forthecoming. For now check out a mirrored screenshot of the Atari 7800 version of Lucasarts’ Rescue on Fractalus, along with the opening screens of both the Temperature and Light Modules from AtariLab (whatever those are) here. As always, we’ll keep you posted when news hits.

The California Extreme Anti-Report

As those of you who viewed our auction might have observed, I attended this year’s California Extreme on Sunday, August 8, in San Jose. While there I got to check out some unreleased arcade games in their prototype state. Here’s a brief report:

Primal Rage 2 seemed interesting, but the joysticks were broken. Apparently it’s in MAME now, which is news to me.

Marble Madness 2: Marble Man looked like a lot of fun, with bonus games and traps not even dreamed of in the first game, but the joysticks were broken. Check out some screenshots from a private ROM dump, along with photos and lots of other information, here.

Beavis and Butthead might have been cool in co-op mode, but Butthead’s joystick was broken. Check out the screenshots I took at the show here, or take a look at some blurry shots of a later build of the game here.

And while we’re on the subject: for those of you left hanging by the ending of the original Primal Rage, this page offers a more than satisfying conclusion to the epic tale.

Ixion has never been commercially released on any format, although Lee Krueger of ResQSoft is looking into producing the Atari 2600 version on cartridge. We’ll keep you updated, hopefully sooner than three months after the fact. In the meantime, I’ve mirrored all of the publicized (and even one non-publicized!) screenshots of the Atari 2600 version on this page. Pardon the blurriness, Krueger saved the original emulator screenshots as JPEG-formatted images for some strange reason.

The Smartest Collector Alive

Commemorative Magazine ended last night, with the high bid being an absolute bargain at only thirty dollars American.

The winning bidder is none other than G.I. Joe nemesis Cobra Commander, who apparently got into videogames after C.O.B.R.A. disbanded. He runs a site called PlanetNES, check it out. It’s got a pretty decent commercial archive, among other sections.

“Whether or not it’s really worth anything monatarily [sic] or not,” said Cobra Commander, in that hilariously raspy voice of his, “it’s a pretty cool thimg [sic] to have, and I’m proud to say it’s mine.”

Thanks to Cobra Commander for the money, eBay for hosting the auction, and Paypal for mysteriously charging me a buck twenty for the payment transaction.

TI-99 Funware Prototypes Unleashed!

Good news for the piling masses of TI-99 fans out there! The TI-99/4A Videogame House, as promised in a previous news post, has released the ROM files for Ant Colony and Lobster Bay, both of which are unreleased games developed by Funware.

We reported on Lobster Bay previously. We have yet to play Ant Colony, but from screenshots, it appears to involve destroying gigantic, mutated ants in a maze-like setting.

Mysterious 2600 Universal Game Released

Curt Vendel of The Atari Historical Socity has released a ROM dump of the mysterious Universal-developed prototype for the Atari 2600 that we posted about previously.

While the title remains unknown, we can confirm that this is a drag-racing game, which seems to be in an unfinished state. Options seem limited, and the sprite flicker is reported to be fairly problematic.